Crossed Wires
by SortedStars
Summary: Determined to begin wiping out the red in her ledger, Natasha has been ingrained with the idea that she is only as good as the result of her mission. After a somewhat disastrous mission of which she and her partner have varying opinions of their success, Clint talks her through it, and she realizes that maybe she doesn't need to be quite so hard on herself after all.


**I adore Natasha Romanoff and thoroughly enjoyed writing this story. Some general information, if desired:**

**This story could be interpreted as early Clint/Natasha or not. **

**I imagine that this story would take place early on in their partnership, before the events of The Avengers. **

**Disclaimer: I own nothing.**

** Thank you for reading!**

* * *

It was two in the morning and Natasha was beginning to lose patience with the chipper voice in her ear.

"Man, wouldn't it just be perfect if S.H.I.E.L.D. brought back the annual Halloween party? Because I am definitely feeling appropriately festive sitting among all these cobwebs in the dark. The very quiet dark, too, because my partner doesn't want to talk to me or inform me of her status, and I must say that it is just a bit concerning."

She had been listening to her new partner chatter on for the past hour or so. She had yet to respond beyond the most necessary of curt updates, and even those felt unnatural to utter. The Black Widow was not accustomed to operating as half of a duo. In all of her time at the Red Room and in the KGB, she either worked by herself or as a blindly isolated piece of a greater scheme, but it was almost always the former. So, to say the least, she found this communication aspect of her new job disconcerting and frankly unnecessary. She had successfully dealt with countless situations that were far worse than a bunch of high-profile drug dealers that couldn't even be bothered to show up four hours past their scheduled time.

"Natasha? I can't see you. Are you still there or has the suspense finally killed you?" Hawkeye said jokingly, yet also while straining his neck to peer into the shadows his partner had just disappeared into.

She had slipped quietly into the far part of the warehouse, her ears, eyes, and gun trained on the corner she thought a rustling noise originated from. She stared intently into the dark, weapon poised defensively, until a rather large rat scurried out from among the junk piled in the corner. Natasha huffed silently. Her mission was to eliminate the drug kingpin Jonathan Faust, and while she wouldn't admit it, she was beginning to grow rather bored with the whole ordeal. It was always better to just finish as quickly and efficiently as possible, to throw yourself into anything and everything that was required in order to complete the mission, because that was how you survived. It was how she survived, anyway- from the wrath of the targets, sure, but mostly it was how she survived the wrath of her ex-employers. That's not to say that she hadn't worked long-term undercover missions before- she had done just that dozens of times- but she knew this particular breed of assignment did not demand such enormous patience, so she had no right to drag it out. After all, S.H.I.E.L.D. had said that this was urgent. Natasha intended to deliver, to begin wiping out the red in her ledger piece by piece. It was with this goal in mind that she lowered her weapon and turned on her communicator.

"Just heard a rat. It was a welcome change from your incessant chattering." She said flatly.

Relieved to hear her voice, Clint brushed off her indifference and responded, "You'd think that a big important drug dealer like Faust would value punctuality a bit more. I mean, how can you run an empire like this guy has without a proper grasp of timing?"

"How rude." Natasha answered shortly. Clint could hear a slight edge of frustration in her tone.

The archer was about to return another quip when another voice came over the communicator.

"Barton, Romanoff, we have a situation. Are you both hearing me?" The voice was Coulson's, the handler of Strike Team Delta, and his urgent tone was tinged with a touch of anger. After confirming that comms were functioning, he continued hastily.

"We just discovered that a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent has been in contact with Faust. We're still interrogating her, but we think he knows you're waiting for him and he's not going down as easily as we thought. He knows details about both of you. We need to pull you two back onto the quinjet until we know what we're dealing with. He's still not going to be leaving the area for at least a week, so meet back in 15 and we'll plan our next move."

Natasha scoffed at what she perceived as an order to retreat. If he was coming now, he could be taken down now and never mind the extra obstacles. In her mind, the mission was unchanged at the end of it all, so why leave before she had the opportunity to complete her mission? She heard her partner begin to dismount from his position in the rafters and walk in her direction so silently that anyone else wouldn't have heard it. Meanwhile, Natasha stood unmoving in her position. What good would she be to anyone, let alone S.H.I.E.L.D., if she couldn't handle a little extra pain thrown at her?

"Natasha, come on, we can still have the upper hand once we regroup."

Natasha still didn't move. "Go ahead. I'm staying here to finish the mission." Her past instructors and bosses had ingrained it into her that if she couldn't do the job, then someone else could, and they would. And then she would be useless to anyone. Hesitation was unacceptable, and retreating was treason. It was made clear to her that both would be met with the swift death that she should have delivered to her target.

Hawkeye stood at her side, and said, slightly incredulously, "Tasha, we need to go back for more info. This guy will be back tomorrow and we'll finish the mission then. Let's go, Coulson's waiting for us."

"Don't call me that," was all that Natasha had time to snap before the wall furthest to them erupted into flames. If she wasn't so highly conditioned, the sight of the fire and the memories it brought forth would have frozen her in place.

_The hospital. The heat. The screaming. The flames. The screaming. _

But she didn't freeze. She yanked her weapon towards the door where dozens of men with weapons and dark clothes were exploding into the room and firing off their weapons towards the pair of assassins. She sensed her partner doing the same, drawing back arrow after arrow as she felled one after another, darting behind various piles of junk to shield herself from the endless waves of bullets. In other words, she was in her element. The nearness to death- it felt natural. If it wasn't a deathly risk, then it was not important enough to justify her life. It was this deeply rooted and nearly subconscious message that prompted her to leap from her shelter and dash to the back of the room closest to the flames. She had spotted Jonathan Faust, and she was going to complete her mission. Once she reached her target, a tall, muscular man of about 40, she attacked. Her first gun lay long lost among the growing flames and pools of enemy blood, but if there was one thing Natasha excelled at, it was concealing a ridiculous amount of weapons on her person. After pulling a knife from up her sleeve, she began to battle with Faust, ignoring the climbing flames that threatened to consume her from behind. In hand-to-hand combat, Natasha was easily besting the kingpin, slicing this way and that until she was finally poised in the perfect position to deliver the fatal blow. But before she could do so, Faust began to laugh a darkly sinister laugh.

The words slipped from his mouth. "Natalia, do you not remember the heat? the flames? Do you not remember what you did to them? What you _didn't _do? I have heard of how impressive your work was that day."

Natasha's eyes glazed over for a flash of a second.

_It was so hot. They were all too hot. They couldn't take it anymore. She didn't save them. She killed them. All of them. And there was so much red, the red of the flames, the red of all the blood, the red of her hair as she left the hospital behind to burn. While they screamed. _

It wasn't even a second of hesitation, but it was enough for Faust to fire the weapon concealed in his coat pocket. Natasha jerked back to the present just in time to register the bullet lodging itself in her left side. The adrenaline numbed the pain she should have felt telling her that something was very wrong, and she evaded his next rounds with an invigorated swiftness. Her sole focus, her only reason for functioning, was to finish her job. _We have no place for the weak, Natalia. _She blocked out the heat of the fire, the pain of her past, the sound of Clint finishing off the last of the henchmen and yelling at her to take cover. She scaled the ladder leading up to the rafters with speed and agility that no injured person should be capable of possessing and produced yet another knife, this time from the inside of her boot. She registered the layer of glass between her position in the ceiling and her target on the ground for the sole purpose of rapidly calculating how difficult it would be to break through it. After her decision, she threw herself down with all the force she could muster. Her knife found its target and she found herself becoming lost among the flames closing in on her from all sides. Only after registering the slump in Jonathon Faust's spine and realizing that she had succeeded did she become aware of how much blood she had lost, and was still rapidly losing, from the wound in her lower left side. As she staggered out of the epicenter of the scorching flames, a wave of dizziness nearly brought her to her knees.

She heard her name, faintly, panicked, "Natasha! Natasha!"

And then another wave of dizziness - or was it a rush of blood, maybe? - compelled her knees to buckle under her as she slipped onto darkness.

* * *

_"Nat!"_

_"There...fire...she didn't..."_

_"Is she...what..."_

_"When...able to..."_

_"Natasha?"_

Natasha slowly pried her eyes open, attempting to adjust to the light before blinking against it. As her world came into focus, she settled on her surroundings with mounting anxiety and uncertainty. She was lying down in a bed she didn't recognize in a place she hadn't been before and she was surrounded by doctors she didn't know. As her recollection of the mission began coming back to her, first a trickle and then a flood, she shot up to a sitting position only to experience a sharp, intense pain in her left side that almost left her gasping for breath.

"Natasha, calm down, you're okay. You're at S.H.I.E.L.D. Medical, specifically, which I know you hate even more than that card I got you that sang 'The Itsy Bitsy Spider,' but it was kinda necessary considering you were all but bled out when Hill's team came in after us."

The concern in her partner's voice was poorly masked with casualness as the sound drifted over from her right. She lowered herself back down to a reclined seat and turned her head to face Clint, who was sitting in a chair pulled up beside her bed.

While her mind continued to unfog, she asked, "How long have I been here? What happened? I remember killing Faust. I completed the mission. But what about after?"

As she spoke, Clint's face fell out a grin and transformed into a grim line, even a bit angry.

"What do you mean 'you completed the mission?' You almost got yourself killed, Natasha. And what the hell was that about, refusing to regroup back with Coulson? You knew that was too dangerous." Clint's voice was partially sharp, partially pained, and partially tired.

Natasha fixed her gaze on a point just behind her partner's head to avoid looking him in the eyes.

"I asked first," was her firm reply.

Clint sighed. "Fine." He met her gaze and continued. "You've been unconscious for about two days. After you killed Faust, you passed out by the fire. Apparently when we didn't turn back up to meet him, Coulson sent in backup. They put out the fire and generally cleaned up after us while you got rushed here. Terrifying plane ride, by the way. You lost a lot of blood in the warehouse. No one knows how you functioned the way you did. It was touch and go for a bit, but here you are. You'll be fine, but a few weeks of rest are in order."

Natasha narrowed her eyebrows into a glare upon hearing the end of his recap.

With Natasha's questions out of the way, he moved back to his. "Now, care to explain why you thought it was necessary to take on a legion of armed henchmen, nearly bleed and burn to death simultaneously, and, oh yeah, throw yourself through a layer of glass for absolutely no reason?" He stared at her intently.

Natasha simply answered, "I finished the mission that was given to me. I did what needed to be done to complete it."

Clint wasn't satisfied with this answer in the least. "You almost _died, _Natasha, when you knew that you didn't need to take that risk. So what possessed you? I just don't understand."

Now it was Natasha's turn to sigh. "Why do any of you care? The job is done, and if I had died completing it, then you wouldn't want me around anymore anyway if I wasn't good enough to keep myself alive."

Clint was speechless for a moment. He opened his mouth, closed it, and then opened it again. "Natasha," he said, horrified, "You don't get it, do you?" After composing himself for a moment, he went on in a more even tone, still looking into her eyes from his chair beside her hospital bed, leaning in.

"Nat, S.H.I.E.L.D. is not the KGB, and it's not the Red Room. You aren't just a piece of the game that is overused until it breaks. Trust me, I know how that feels, and this is different. You are a person, not just a weapon, and you're sure as hell not that easily replaceable. You don't have to kill yourself to prove yourself to any of us."

Natasha softened, and then stiffened again. "I don't deserve to be trusted. I've done terrible things that I need to atone for. I can't do that if I hesitate."

Clint shook his head. "Nat, there's a difference between hesitation and calculation. And I don't just mean heat-of-the-moment calculation, either. There is nothing wrong with keeping yourself safe. And you owe it to everyone here, especially yourself, to take care of yourself." He grinned. "How else is my partner supposed to keep a running list of all of my brilliant ideas that only occur to me when we're on missions?"

Natasha was quiet. He hadn't spoken for very long, but she was given a lot to process. Maybe she understood what he meant. If she was going to make up for her past, she needed to be alive to do it. And maybe taking some precautions wouldn't be a sign of weakness, but rather something that ensured that she could complete her mission. And maybe... maybe it was time she left her past behind for good. At least that part of it that continued to torture her by demanding the impossible. Finally, she rolled her eyes.

"Somehow, I doubt that double bedside tables for bunk beds or a grocery store that sells nothing but your favorite peanut butter would be a highly profitable endeavor," she said as she looked him in the eyes for a first time that day. It was also the first time that she looked him in the eyes with just the hint of a smile, which with time would turn into a smirk, and then a grin, until finally she let herself snicker at Fury or laugh at a new recruit, all with her partner at her side.

The next month, she was the one scolding Clint for lingering a second too long in the line of fire of a criminal he was antagonizing.

* * *

**This came a bit out of nowhere, but I have always loved reading about Natasha's (mostly friendly) relationships with each of the avengers and how they teach each other to live. Thanks again for reading!**


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